In Which We Almost Go To Paris (Thebes and NYC, 1970-1990)

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In Which We Almost Go To Paris

(Thebes and NYC, 1970-1990)

When I was eleven or twelve years old, before I was expelled from the
Nederland School for Boys, Celeste decided that we should move
to Paris. To me it seemed that the decision was made suddenly, although
in fact it was probably the crystallization of years of longing, nourished
by Godard festivals at the Film Forum, friends who had the money to vacation
in Europe, a new translation of the letters of Simone de Beauvoir. It
happened at dinner, one evening in the spring; we had finished eating
and we were still sitting at the table, talking about Lucy Kerckhoffs,
one of Celeste’s fellow teachers at the Holy Name Day School,
who was leaving the profession to get married, and how strange it was
that women still did that, got married and left their jobs, when
Celeste said, as though it followed from what she had been saying before,
“Don’t you think we’d all be happier in Paris?”

“Paris?”

“America is in decline,” said Celeste.
“I think we should move to Paris.”

I expected Marie to object, because she usually did when her
sister generalized, and also because Marie didn’t like
French things, she preferred the bright colors of Africa and South America,
a fact that I found useful when buying her presents. But all she said
was, “Paris.”

“It makes sense,” Celeste
said. “We can get a bigger place than this over there for what we’re
paying. The exchange rate is good. We could work for UNESCO, or teach
English, or art.”

Celeste talked about how they could get
their visas, and what it would cost to fly, and how much money they would
need to save before they could go, and suddenly I had to think, Paris?

I didn’t want to go. I had a teacher at Nederland, Mrs. Booth,
who went to Paris every summer. She was a big woman who wore a big gold
necklace, who laughed at me for saying je suis chaud, when the correct
phrase was j’ai chaud, but wouldn’t tell me what was funny
about the mistake. I imagined that all of Paris would be like Mrs. Booth,
made-up and overdressed, laughing at me for something I had unwittingly
done wrong.

“And in the summer,” Celeste said, “we’ll
visit Italy and Greece.”

In the summer, then, I wouldn’t go
to Thebes. Panic settled in my stomach, a cold aching spot above and to
the right of my navel. I couldn’t say that I didn’t want to
go, or Celeste would only become more determined; I knew that about
her by then. So I had to listen in silence as Celeste described
the life we would all be living in less than a year’s time, how
we would get up early to shop in the markets and stay out late on summer
evenings, walking up and down the boulevards.

It was the pain in my stomach that gave me my idea, because wasn’t
the appendix to the right of the navel? I knew kids at Nederland who
had scars where their appendixes had been taken out. They’d gone
to the hospital, and spent weeks recovering, I thought. So that would
be my defense against Paris, appendicitis, if only I could time my rupture
right. “Are there any potatoes left?” I asked. Marie
passed them to me in silence. As I ate, I pictured myself in bed in Thebes,
recovering from an appendectomy, scarred, weak, but alive, and in Thebes,
talking to the Celestes on a transatlantic line, keeping our conversations
brief, speaking loudly into static. I ate until I was full and I kept
eating.

“What do you think about Paris?” Marie asked me.

“I don’t know,” I said, my mouth full of bread. “I
hear French girls are pretty.”

Celeste laughed and hit the
table with her fingertips. “He’s going to be a Casanova,”
she said. “Won’t you be a Casanova?”

“I don’t
know,” I said. “What’s a Casanova?”

“A man who women like,” Marie
said.

“Your father was a Casanova,” Celeste said.

I
nodded gravely and added the fact to my hoard of information about Richard Ente. “I might be one,”
I said, which made my mothers laugh.

“He’ll love Paris,”
Celeste said. “Let’s go tomorrow.”

“I don’t
know,” Marie said. “Let’s think it over.”

French music filled our apartment. Waltzes, tangos, polkas and fox-trots
for clarinet and accordion while my mothers made dinner, then Brel, Piaf,
Greco, singing softly while we ate. After dinner, Celeste put on
an old gypsy song and reeled around the kitchen, washing the dishes and
wiping the counters. Tes troublants yeux noirs, prometteurs d’espoir….
Your disturbing dark eyes, which promise hope…. Her dark eyes met
the dark eyes of her sister and moved hopefully away. It was part of the
strategy she had devised to entice Marie into agreeing to go
to Paris: Celeste maintained a musical barrage, an unending onslaught
of sound, so that the beauty and elegance of the French would not be forgotten
for even a moment, and the sound of their instruments and their intricate
French rhymes would become the background against which we lived our lives,
like the whisper of traffic on Riverside Drive, a sonic marker of where
we were, which would have alarmed us if it stopped.

Nor was music her only weapon. Celeste made concerted assaults
on Marie’s palate, and incidentally on mine, once or twice
a week, which varied in their success as Celeste was not consistently
a good cook. Her chicken, or, as she called it, poulet with haricots
verts amazed us, but her cassoulet was a brown inedible mass of expensive
ingredients, and she was betrayed by her dessert, the same tarteaux too-sweet fruits night after night, because she
couldn’t bake and the pastry shop on Broadway had a limited selection
of authentically French fare.

Celeste made up for these deficiencies by shifting our meals to
a “European” schedule, which meant that we ate dinner at eight-thirty,
by candlelight, and had our salad after the main course. The Celestes
had always drunk wine with dinner; now Celeste took a bottle of
liqueur from the bottom of the linen closet after dinner and poured a
glass for herself and her sister; as they sipped their drinks, and we
listened to Brel sing on and on about the port of Amsterdam, she would
sometimes light a Lucky Strike, tilt her head back, and blow smoke through
her teeth at the ceiling. If we had gone to France then, I think we would
have been disappointed at how American it was; certainly we would have
remarked on the quiet. But there was nothing wrong with our new life;
our French dinners were just as good as the American ones had been, and
the music, irritating at first, gained a giddy charm when Marie
showed me how to dance to it.

Also, Celeste was happy. Normally, when she washed the dishes,
she was certain to break a glass, sometimes two; now nights and even weeks
went by when we didn’t hear the Fuck! of ruined glassware. She laughed
more often, sometimes she even giggled, a sound I had never heard her
make before, and which seemed to transform her, so that she became even
younger than her sister. At dinner she talked more about herself, and
the things she was going to do. She revealed to us that she had wanted
for a long time to learn how to weld metal; now she’d asked a friend
who taught at the Cooper Union, and he was going to initiate her into
the mysteries of the blowtorch.

“Where are you going to weld?”
Marie asked, even though we both knew the answer.

“When
we move to Paris, we’ll have a studio, a big studio.”

Even as she deferred the ultimate fulfillment of her dreams to the time
when we would live in Paris, the thought that we were going, that we might
go, inspired her to take the intermediate steps that she had been putting
off for years. She sent in an application for a grant from the State Council
on the Arts, because, she said, you could still be a New Yorker in France;
she got out her sketchbook and drew metal ovals and long metal limbs.

What was even more striking, the way she talked about other people changed.
The faculty at the high school where she taught were no longer those jerks
or those idiots, and the students were no longer slow and troubled. The
super’s family problems vanished from her conversation, and the
super himself followed; the students and the faculty and the school itself
came up less and less, as though they had comprised an unpleasant but
exciting event, an elevator breakdown or a friend’s illness, that
was now over, and was fading into the past. New York itself was disappearing
from our living-dining room, one inconvenience at a time: the subway went,
and the grocery store, and the neighbor whose son was learning to play
the piano; the dogs vanished from the park, then the park vanished; only
the weather remained, and the ominous knock of the pipes, which were still
heating our apartment even though spring had begun.

Celeste was happy because the world was vanishing, and meanwhile
I pursued my plan to make my appendix burst. I ate the French chicken
down to its American bones; I devoured the beans, the bread and butter,
the soft yellow cheese that smelled like an unwashed person; I ate the
last éclair. I had stomach-aches every night and went to bed happy,
dreaming of Thebes. “You’re getting a little tummy,”
Marie said to me one morning when I was coming out of the bathroom,
a towel stretched around my waist. It was true, I was filling out, becoming
round, I needed new pants and in the locker room at Nederland I changed
with my stomach pressed into my locker, as though that would escape notice.
It would all be worth it, I thought, come the day.

I wonder what would have happened if we had gone to Paris. Would Celeste’s transformation have been permanent, or would she have
begun to complain about those bitches in the UNESCO typing pool,
the crazy prices at the covered market, the concierge’s
drinking problem? Would she have found another city to pin her hopes
on, and filled our Paris apartment with incense and the droning of the
sitar? I like to think she would have been happy, that we would have been
happy there. I include myself, although I never abandoned my secret plan,
and kept hidden under my bed an old, increasingly noxious square of coffee
cake, that I thought was certain to blow out my already tortured appendix,
and that probably would have killed me if I’d eaten it. Paris, that
music, those tarts, was becoming a part of my daily life, and I might
have been happy about it, except that the spring was warming up, and with
it, unbidden, came my memories of Thebes. The cherry trees in Riverside
Park produced white-pink petals and I produced memories, of the old green
mountains, the Summerkill, the man-made lake with the sandy beach, my grandparents’
house, the little yellow room where I would lie and read.

Even as Celeste circled advertisements in the back of The New
York Review of Books for Paris apartments to rent, I was thinking
about the hot wooden smell of my grandparents’ attic and the cool
stone smell of the basement. The spring tortured me; the summer tied my
thought in knots. Pink-white blossoms covered the ground; New Jersey vanished
behind a bank of smog; you could go outside without a jacket; still I
waited in the apartment, watching my mothers as a dog watches its humans.
Were we going to Paris? There were only a few days left in the school
year when a letter came for Marie, offering her an assistant
editorship at S, a women’s magazine, a position she’d
applied for almost a year earlier.

The Celestes talked about it over
poulet basquaise that night.

“What I want to know is, where do they get all that money?”
Marie said.

“From women,” said her sister. “It’s
those fat people, you know. Like Jan Engeler.”

“Oh, Jan!”
Marie giggled. “The lady with the cats.”

“Another
glass of wine?”

Celeste poured for both of them. My mothers
talked about the horrible people they’d known in Thebes. Marie laughed louder each time her sister made a joke at their expense,
but Celeste wasn’t laughing. There was a terrible intensity in her face; she leaned forward on her
chair, her shoulders pulled in close to her chest, and looked at her sister
as though she were an oracle about to speak. Whenever Marie’s
glass was almost empty, she refilled it, and they went on talking, now
about Thebes, now about the magazine. “And those models!”
Celeste said. “It’s the culture of starvation.”
But she was careful not to criticize S unequivocally, lest Marie rebel. “Of course, it’s the women’s magazines
that make the rules. You could put fat models in, and people would start
eating again.” Celeste cleared the table and brought out dessert.

She took the liqueur bottle from the cabinet and poured glasses for herself
and her sister. “Santé!”

“Santy Claus to you,
too.”

With this the sisters fell silent. We ate the tart.

“It’s
a lot of money, though,” Marie said.

“That’s
true,” said Celeste. “It’s more than I make.”

She patted her sister’s hand. “Maybe you should go for the
interview.” The look she directed at Marie, though, was
one of pure anguish, and Marie saw it.

Celeste lit a cigarette. She leaned her head
back and blew smoke at the ceiling. “I hear they have magazines
in France,” she said. This was her best argument, and after she
had advanced it, she stopped speaking, for fear of undoing its charm.

Marie sipped her liqueur. “I have to think about it,”
she said.

She got up from the table and went into the kitchen. Her glass
was still half-full of green liquid; Celeste studied it, then, with
a swift, angry motion, drank it herself. Soon afterwards I left for Thebes.
I was relieved that I hadn’t needed to burst my appendix, but I
still had that tummy, which has, in fact, never left me, and which I carry
with me even now, a souvenir of a trip we never made.